The guards carried me past collapsed wood stands, around little fires and puddles of alcohol and vomit and through the Ocelots’ emerald-green end-zone into the main trench of the ball court. Its floor had been neutralized with a layer of thousands of pink geranium blossoms, but otherwise it was a mess, with bits of clothing and weapons and blood all over the stands and platforms. They carried me out over a lake of petals to a big Harpy trading mat that had been laid out in the center of the face-off zone. I didn’t see 2JS anywhere but from the way the attendants acted I got the sense he was behind me, watching. There were Harpy guards standing at the banks and on each end zone, but I noticed one of them was unconscious at his post and another two were nibbling on his bare feet, tearing off strips of skin and swallowing them. Looks good, I thought. Some kind of fight erupted behind me and I looked around, but it was just another Harpy blood sitting on the ground and shouting. He was all wild-eyed and foamy at the nose. He started kicking out at his brothers, who stood back and urinated all over him. The far end-zone was mainly pyramidal stacks of bodies, ready to be dealt with but not getting processed. A few were squirming but at least there were more dead ones than live ones. It was a perfect day for the horde of the flies. Some of the corpses hadn’t even been stripped of their elaborate-ass festival regalia. It was like those photos of British officers frozen in the Crimea, where they’re wearing all this fancy stuff but they’re still really messed up. Through the eastern V of the court I could see a bit of the wide steps up to the council house. It all looked like the ratty tail end of a late party, people stagger-dancing and flapping their arms. Harpies with victors’ blossoms and untended captives, bloods who had fought against each other a little while ago, were sitting motionless next to each other, staring into nearby infinity. A little Ocelot boy sat on a soldier’s dead body, pricking himself over and over on the chest with a spearhead.

Psyche, I thought. Fabulous. I’d been worried that the shit would be too diluted. Not that I was out of the frying pot yet. Trade me out, I thought, they’d better be trading me out. Come on, Koh, babe. Trade me out. A ten-man treaty party was advancing from the other side of the court, but I couldn’t make out who they were since they were all in neutral clothes. The Harpy negotiators set me in the center of the trading mat. Again. I wondered whether my stock had gone up or down and tried to check out what was on the other side, but it was just a stack of tied screenfold tribute books and another damn dish of clay tokens I couldn’t read through my one messed-up eye. I held myself up for a beat, saw that under their mantos the other traders were Rattlers’ Children, which meant they’d come from Lady Koh.

I rolled back on the down-soft fabric. A big fly, her abdomen filled with eggs, lighted on the outside corner of my sighted eye. I blinked but she wouldn’t go away. It was too likely a spot. I was too relieved to care much, though. They turned me over to a team of dressers, because I remember being in a neutral-color tent with a couple of people working on my leg while a surgeon rubbed yellow cocaine syrup into my empty eye socket. I whined a little and he gave me a ball of corn silk soaked in cocaine and morning-glory paste to chew on. I couldn’t move. Maybe it was for my own good. They really took charge of you around here. It wasn’t just that I’d been tied up half the time. It was like ninety percent of the time I was treated like a week-old baby. Or like a cow going through a packing plant. I thought about asking him to cut a chunk out of the bridge of my nose, like the Duke di Montefeltro’s, so that I could see a bit farther to the right. But I decided maybe I’d had enough folk-medical abuse for one day.

At another point, which I guess must have been later, I could tell I was lying prone on a fur pallet in a stone room. It was all blue and glowy and I wasn’t alone. There was this incredible itching in the ball of my right foot. I tried to scratch it, and my arm actually seemed to work, but I couldn’t find the foot anywhere. Eventually I felt for my penis-great, it was still around, I thought-and then followed my leg down from there with my hand. The leg ended in a crusty cauterized stump just below the knee, but as I viciously scratched the stump it felt like I was scratching my old foot again with penetrating electric fingers. Absolute bliss. I felt for the bone at the core but it had been plugged with wax.

Where’s what’s left of me? I giggled. At this rate all that’s going to come back to Marena will be a brain in a vat. If that. Vat. Bat. Vein in a brat.

I exploded into a sneezing-fit-someone must have stuck some fish-tincture up my nose, kind of like smelling salts. I rubbed my eye. Warm oily hands turned me over and held my head up toward the light. The far walls were covered with the wings of blue morpho butterflies. Lady Koh was sitting at its center, looking at me out of the heart of the cerulean bloom. She had a wooden dish on the table in front of her, and inside the dish I recognized my leg, dry-cured and dusted with cinnabar.

The thirty Grandfathers of Heat between July 16, the day Koh traded me out of captivity, and today-13 Motion, that is, January 22, 664 AD, the first day of my combined wedding-and-seating festival-isn’t quite a total dropout. I remember stuff. But I was in such a flaky mental state that either I don’t remember what came before what, or I think I must be remembering the explanation of what had happened to me that someone gave me later instead of the actual occurrence. And trying to sort it out seems like a labor of Penelope.

In fact, having my coiffure done in the once-in-a-lifetime Hero Twins Senegalese-twistesque style-which took them over five hours, mainly because my natural hair was still only two inches long and they insisted on hitch-knotting each strand of the extensions on separately-is almost the first thing I can remember as a definitely time-marked event. I remember thinking how I’d come a long way-how Koh was in charge of Ix, and how pretty soon she’d put me nominally in charge by marrying me-and how much I still had to do. I had to organize a human Sacrifice Game with Lady Koh, and play it until we got to the 4 Ahau date of the last b’aktun. And even if we didn’t come up with anything-well, since I’d buried the Lodestone Cross cache, I’d learned what felt like ten times as much about the Game. Maybe even if I didn’t get my brain back, it would still be enough to make Taro’s version of the game sufficiently powerful, powerful enough to neutralize the 2012 dooomster. So I had to write that all down in a form that, if I didn’t make it back, Jed 1 would still understand. I had to take over 2 Jeweled Skull’s ROC gel operation and make sure we had enough of all the different compounds. I had to get the tomb in order. I had to figure out how to bury myself in a way that would ensure that my tomb would be undisturbed. And those were only the main things. Each of them needed hundreds of other things to get done first, even to have a chance of working. And I was already getting double images and microblackouts and spike headaches and other brain-tumor symptoms. And before I could do anything else, I had to heal my leg and my eye and get at least half-functional. I lay still for days on end in a tiny pinkwashed room that adjoined a different, smaller sweat-bath, kind of a celebrity hospital and detox center, just feeling my wounds itchily stitch themselves together. I’d lie there doing yoga eye-exercises with my one eye, moving my focus as slowly as possible from upper left to lower right, repeating the process hundreds of times, getting comfortable with the most interesting pocks and cracks on the stucco ceiling. I wasn’t exactly depressed in that way where the whole world seems like it’s made out of Homasote, but I was definitely fuged out and totally exhausted, with a flavoring of that resignation you get to when you know you’re really broken beyond repair. Sometimes when I’d fall asleep a tattoo scribe would sneak in, rub anesthetic into, say, my upper arm, and when I’d wake up there’d be a sore patch with another row of twenty head-glyphs and the name of each captive I’d supposedly taken. Of course I hadn’t actually captured anyone, but Lady Koh had dedicated their blood to me because I’d made it all possible. Becoming a capturer was like being a “made” man in the Mafia, where you’re sort of certified by performing a killing.